[paddington]

if the pops are IN the audio, no.

sometimes the gaps (with abrupt cuts) in the data (audio) between tracks on a badly-tracked (not on boundaries) CD will cause the PLAYER to pop a bit when dropping to dead silence and back again. If THAT is the case, removing all those zeros might allow you to wind up with seamless audio.


The right way to use "gap removal" or "align on sector boundaries" is to do it BEFORE the audio is burned to disc. Once it is burned to CD, there usually isn't going to be a good way of removing the pops / clicks without doing it manually - but you're changing the audio when you do. Once the clicks are there, the audio has been destroyed and really shouldn't be traded.


If you cut the tracks wherever you want in something like cool edit, then, when encoding with FLAC Frontend, using "align on sector boundaries", that option will do a very good job of sliding the splits to the proper spots to be sure each sector is filled with audio data and not trailing zeros.

When you burn to CD, the sectors that are not full WILL fill with zeros, so when you rip it back, you have a bunch of bullshit there to clip out and you cannot do a perfect job - the audio has been compromised.



Better to just pay attention the first time. There is lots of info here to help with aligning CD tracks cuts on sector boundaries.